JavaScript frameworks like jQuery make it so easy to dive in that it’s easy to forget how to do basic things in a language. Here’s a great overview on how to step back into vanilla JavaScript and build up from there.

Brennan Dunn on how he went from an idea to paying customers in 3 days and validated his idea without writing a line of code:

So I was losing money by having a “dumb” website. My idea was: “What if my website was smarter than this?” At this point, I didn’t care about how my website could be smarter, I just wanted to know what would happen to my business with this problem stripped away. What could tomorrow look like for me? (Again, straight out of 30×500.)

A lot of people might start with the problem and immediately start thinking about what needs to be created to solve it. And as creatives, this is no surprise. After all, we build stuff for a living. But if you’re hoping to lower the risk of failure, stepping away from the code (or the words, or the design, or whatever) is a smart move.

One of the stated values at IronPort was “work/life balance,” but I clearly wasn’t living it. I was rarely home. And when I was home, well, let’s just say I wasn’t particularly helpful or cheery. My perspective at the time was: I’m killing myself at work, so when I get home, I just want to kick back with a cocktail and watch some TV. All I do is talk to people all day long and so at home, I’d really prefer not to talk much, just relax.

The most important relationships in your life are those at home – your spouse, children, and other family. Your work will bring you temporary pleasure and recognition, but in the long run, you have to remember that if you died tomorrow you’d be replaced and the world would keep moving.

Nathan Barry just launched the beta of his new course (only available for the next day) on how to use Photoshop to design interfaces. This is a course that doesn’t start with how to remove red eye or retouch photos, but instead, focuses on the tools you need to design software.

Writing an effective pitch comes with requiring a deep understanding of your target market and really being able to identify their pain points. Without this, you may just be building a “great idea” and not something that people would actually pay for.

Everpix did a final post mortem and uploaded a wealth of data about the company to their Github account. I can’t help but think that this would have made a really great bootstrapped business, and that possibly with some pricing tweaks (possibly limit the free plan?) and not using S3, which is known for absurdly high storage price, that this could have been a very sustainable business.

Too many companies think that VC is the only option, or maybe the “safer” bet since you’ve got cash in the bank. But the constraints of bootstrapping you company force you to make tough decisions that must lead to profitability – not just growth hacking so the VCs can get their money back.

For VCs, anything short of a Facebook or Instagram is a failure. So if your tech business isn’t the next Facebook or Instagram, it may not be well suited for VC.

Google Hangouts is fantastic: really the only good feature of Google+, and a favorite of many people who work with remote teams. Recently I found myself having to schedule several meetings over Hangouts, and I didn’t want to deal with inviting people when it was time for the meeting to start.

Well, Google offers a very undocumented solution to this problem: you can set up a mostly permanent Hangout to use for quick collaboration.

To set one up, visit Google+ Events and click Create Event. Under Event Options » Advanced, check off “Hangouts” to make it an online event only:

Then, set your event date to some day far in the future. Your Hangout link will expire on this day, so be sure to set yourself a reminder to redo this.

Once it’s created, you should see it in your upcoming events:

Click the Hangouts link to open your empty hangout. The URL in this window is your permanent link you can now quickly share to people to set up a quick conference call with screen sharing and such.

Bonus tip: You can use Smile Software’s fantastic TextExpander to set up a snippet to drop the link easily. I personally use hhangout.

If you want it bad enough, you’ll make the time, regardless of your other obligations. Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses. It’s too easy and, to be honest, nobody cares on the other side.

It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come through.

I have a 7 month old baby, and while my first priority in my non-working time has been to be a great dad and good husband to my wife, I manage to make time to work on interesting projects. The less time I have, the more focused I’ve had to be: 45 minutes here, an hour there. You find a way to do it.

Great chart to see what shows are driving higher ad rates. What’s amazing is how much higher Sunday Night Football on NBC is ($545,142) than anything else. The next closest are Modern Family ($330,908) and New Girl ($320,940). Sports is big business.